There is considerable controversy over how spontaneously people draw inferences about the traits that may cause others' behavior. For example, when we hear that someone was fired for tardiness do we infer that this person is lazy? Such dispositional inferences have been postulated to be fundamental to the maintenance of stereotypes and the elicitation of aggression. However, the importance of dispositional inferences in social cognition is directly related to how spontaneously the inferences are made. This proposal outlines a plan of research designed to: (1) refine the methodology for detecting spontaneous dispositional inferences, (2) determine if the activation of traits in memory is sufficiently robust to influence on-going information processing, and (3) explore the consequences of the generation of, dispositional inferences for judgments about others. The general strategy will be to present descriptions of someone's behavior and then use an implicit memory test to determine if particular traits have been inferred. Implicit memory refers to the retrieval of information about some experience without conscious recollection. For example, people tend to complete word stems (such as TR________ ) with recently studied words (or their semantic associates) even if the purpose of the stem completion test is disguised or the studied words cannot be deliberately retrieved. Preliminary data indicate that a version of the word stem completion task can be used to detect the inferences made automatically during comprehension. In the research proposed, potential reasons for inconsistent results in previous studies will be examined. Then a direct assessment will be made of whether dispositional information activated from one sentence in a passage becomes part of the on-going representation of the passage , or, instead, decays quickly with no lasting effect. Finally, the research will be extended to the role that dispositional inferences based on a stereotype might play in influencing judgments about a job candidate.